I am interested in the neural basis and the computational principles underlying human decision making. My research focuses on value-based decisions and aims at understanding how the values of available choices are computed from perceptual evidence, internal preferences and the subjective model of the choices context. My current work involves understanding the social context in which we live, how it shapes behavior and how it is encoded by the brain to inform valuation and decision making. I am also trying to understand how the motivation to act and exert the associated effort depends on the context and the pressure to reach a goal.

What follows is brief account of my scientific career so far.

I am not quite sure when I happened to start thinking about what’s happening when thinking but whenever it was, it was happening, physically, behind our eyes. This and other reasons prompted me to study Physics in La Sapienza University in Rome where, in 2009, I graduated with a thesis on a neural network model of sensorimotor control.

At that point it was clear to me how fundamental it was approaching the study of the brain through a principled modelling of the computations it performs. So in September 2009 I came to London to study Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at UCL. One year later I graduated with a project on a statistical model of attention based on approximate inference, which Microsoft judged to be the best of my course, that year.

In November 2014 I obtained a PhD in Neuroscience at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, in the laboratory of Prof.Carandini. Under his supervision, I used Wide-field Intrinsic and Fluorescence Imaging to study the relationship between hemodynamic and neural activity in the mouse visual cortex. During my PhD I took the Theoretical Neuroscience course at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and I published two papers. The first, entitled “Fast hemodynamic responses in the visual cortex of the awake mouse” (Journal of Neuroscience, 2013) studied the effect of brain state on neurovascular coupling, the mechanism at the basis of the most commonly used neuroimaging techniques (i.e. fMRI).

The second, entitled “Local and global contributions to hemodynamic activity in mouse cortex“ (Journal of Neurophysiology, 2016) described more profound effect of brain state on cortical hemodynamic activity suggesting a novel method to analyse neuroimaging data to reveal the differential contributions of external stimuli and internal neural dynamics. The image on the right shows a strong correlation between pupil dilations and cortical hemodynamic activity. If you you want to hear me chatting about this result with two of my scientific heroes, you can do that here.

Originally inspired by reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (which talks a lot about what is happening, metaphorically, behind our eyes), I decided to change research area after my PhD and enter the fascinating field of Neuroeconomics. I joined Marios Philiastides Lab at the University of Glasgow where I studied human decision-making through simultaneous measurement of EEG and fMRI.

In June 2017 I published my first paper on decision making, entitled “Neural correlates of evidence accumulation during value-based decisions revealed via simultaneous EEG-fMRI” (Nature Communications, 2017) showed that preference-based decisions such as choosing between a nutella jar and a package of M&Ms can be described in terms of the classical drift-diffusion model and that such decisions might be represented in the brain areas that plan the action to execute them. The Daily Mail account of my paper further established that we have a good chance to develop a drug to increase willpower, and helped me to understand how Brexit came about (i.e. by sensasionalist reporting of nonsensical/fake news).

At the end of 2018 I moved to the University of Oxford to join the Motivation and Social Neuroscience lab of Matthew Apps. There I have been focusing on effort-based decision making in humans and on the neural and behavioural trade off between cooperation and competition. After a tumultuous couple of years, in the midst of a global pandemic, I followed Matt and the lab to the University of Birmingham albeit initially only virtually, as all our research that year. Then we published a review on pro-social behaviour and cognition and how they are shaped by the effort required: Effort shapes social cognition and behaviour: A neuro-cognitive framework (Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2020). You can read my take on this paper and its implications at this link. While many other papers about topics ranging from physical and cognitive fatigue and effort to fairness in social interactions are currently in review, in 2022 we also finally published a project started in Glasgow that followed me in Oxford and in Birmingham: Neural implementation of computational mechanisms underlying the continuous trade-off between cooperation and competition (Nature Communications, 2022). You can read my take on this paper at this link.